Reviewing transport strategies research

The 'Sustainable mobility days' (Mobidays) project organised a series of three conferences focused on the outcomes of EU-funded projects dedicated to sustainable transport. Project partners commenced by elaborating a working definition of sustainable transport, which was also used to assess EC-funded projects and their contribution to advances in the area. Sustainable mobility supports the realisation of long-term economic growth, social welfare and environmental protection.

Hosted by the Charles University Environment Centre in Prague, the first Mobidays conference aimed to highlight assessment of transport trends and impacts, and efforts dedicated to breaking dependence on oil. Nine projects were thus presented to address various socioeconomic barriers to sustainable transport. From an economic standpoint, these barriers were focused on competitiveness and economic development aspects. They included direct and external costs of transport, regulation of transport services, transport infrastructure pricing, and land-use planning and regional development. Conference activities were geared towards presenting the main findings and recommendations of these projects, as well as discussing the problems they encountered and exploring how these could be overcome. The social aspects dealt mainly with equity and accessibility issues such as the need for transport strategies to offer easy-to-reach facilities, and for the benefits of these strategies to be socially inclusive.

The London conference focused on 'Research on vehicles for sustainable mobility', inviting projects connected with vehicle innovation and with themes classified, among others, as conventional internal combustion engines, new combustion modes, hybrid-electric vehicles, fuel cell vehicles, vehicle safety and new vehicle design concepts – urban mobility. Invited speakers presented the key outcomes of various EC-funded projects so as to stimulate discussion on achievements, practical applications, pitfalls and future EU research priorities. The half-day conference, titled 'Infrastructures for sustainable mobility', sought to review achievements and shortfalls of funded research projects dealing with infrastructures for production, transmission and delivery of alternative road transport fuels.

The final Mobidays Rome conference, focused on large-scale demonstration projects on sustainable mobility both in Europe and internationally, offered opportunities to share and discuss results and accomplishments as well as problems in such activities.

The Mobidays consortium also proposed solutions that could be implemented by the European Commission. These included improvements to databases that could be linked to relevant EC-developed tools as well as the establishment of a new database. The latter could boost ongoing and future research by providing access to data, models, tools developed, deliverable reports and the 'Plan for using and disseminating the knowledge' from relevant projects.